May 8, 2013

Yet few Americans are aware of the dramatic drop, and more than half believe gun crime has risen, according to a newly released survey by the Pew Research Center.

In less than two decades, the gun murder rate has been nearly cut in half. Other gun crimes fell even more sharply, paralleling a broader drop in violent crimes committed with or without guns. Violent crime dropped steeply during the 1990s and has fallen less dramatically since the turn of the millennium.

The number of gun killings dropped 39% between 1993 and 2011, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in a separate report released Tuesday. Gun crimes that weren’t fatal fell by 69%. However, guns still remain the most common murder weapon in the United States, the report noted. Between 1993 and 2011, more than two out of three murders in the U.S. were carried out with guns, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found....

Despite the remarkable drop in gun crime, only 12% of Americans surveyed said gun crime had declined compared with two decades ago, according to Pew, which surveyed more than 900 adults this spring. Twenty-six percent said it had stayed the same, and 56% thought it had increased.

The huge drop in crime in the last two decades is an amazing story of success for our society, but good news just has no juice. I've exposed people to this fact a number of times over the years, and it floats like a lead balloon. Either people don't believe you, or it's a big "that's nice".

Now if tell people something negative like "broken toes are increasing dramatically across the country", they will pass it around like the plague.

Observer bias is a major factor in all sorts of "problems".If the media ain't obsessing about it it can't be a problem.If they are obsesing about it it is a problem.See AGW,subprime lending,womens rights in Islamic countries.US.casualties in GWOT,the self-radicalized,etc.

The exponential growth of firearms in America has seen a corresponding decrease in violent crime.

Correlation is not causation. Besides the drop in lead exposure more closely tracks the drop in violent crime (and has a physiological basis). Also, the portion of the population which owns guns has actually declined. People who own guns are just buying more guns.

Freder Frederson said... Also, the portion of the population which owns guns has actually declined. People who own guns are just buying more guns.

Complete and utter bullshit.

Yes freeper, those dumb yokels you mock endlessly have big piles of cash sitting around to keep buying guns.

Really, they do.

PS: Feb 25 (Reuters) - U.S. gun makers are aiming for record quarterly sales as first-time buyers, including a growing number of women and pensioners, rush to buy weapons before anticipated gun-control laws come into force.

PPS: Across the country, firearms industry analysts point to soaring numbers -- including first-time gun buyers now making up a quarter of all sales and nearly 75 percent of gun retailers reporting sales boosts over last year

Just a guess, but I'll bet crime rates have also dropped where lead exposure was minimal before. I can accept it was a factor, but it smells of a desperate attempt to find an "acceptable" cause. I don't deny it's possible, but the left has jumped on this like it's the entire story from the moment someone came up with it.

The exponential growth of firearms in America has seen a corresponding decrease in violent crime.

Correlation is not causation. Besides the drop in lead exposure more closely tracks the drop in violent crime (and has a physiological basis). Also, the portion of the population which owns guns has actually declined. People who own guns are just buying more guns.

This is an unmitigated lie. You know this. Unless you've owned a gun, fired a gun, held a gun, or been within 2 feet of one, you know nothing about guns or gun ownership. STFU.

--------------------That "Freanokomics" correlation has deeply vexed social scientists since it was presented as a correlative cause and effect. It apparantly has truth in looking at inner city career criminal families, and how abortion has cut down on number of live births expected to also be criminals and thugs.

Naturally, the Right to Life goobers HATE the idea and call it racist and an inner city "genocide". Inner city residents commenting thugh, say there are enough thugs already making their lives hell, and if "Roe" results in less thugs - that's a good thing!

As for having a high degree of skepticism of gun lovers claiming more gun owners are the prime factor that caused the drop in crime....no one that has looked at the crimerate drops believes that. At best, a small "risk" factor for career criminals, and at best, like Roe, a lethal way for inner city people to kill excess thugs.

Along this line Ann Coulter had a recent excellent column about the MSM's coordinated campaign of character assassination of John Lott ("More Guns Less Crime--the only man in America that took the time to compile gun crime stats from every county in America) in describing him as "discredited" at every chance available when in fact his methodology has been overwhelmingly upheld by almost every statistician (save for those who thought he underplayed the results) save only for a single lefty idiot whose defenders have even had to admit he was overreaching.

In 2007-11, there were 235,700 victimizations where the victim used a firearm to threaten or attack an offender (table 11). This amounted to approximately 1% of all nonfatal violent victimizations in the 5-year period.

Furthermore:

A small number of property crime victims also used a firearm in self defense (103,000 victims or about 0.1% of all property victimizations)

It is a standard talking point on the left to entirely dismiss the use of a firearm for self-defense. This is why gun control advocates can freak about AR-15s while offering a mealy-mouthed exception for hunting rifles.

When you consider the number of gun owners and the likelihood a gun owner has access to a gun in event of an attack, 1% is a meaningful number. 2% would be even better.

What matters is that with pervasiveness of guns in our society, there has not been a corresponding increase in acts of involuntary exploitation where a gun was involved.

That said, when special interests in our society (e.g. government) give up their Arms, then we can agree that Arms are not needed to maintain the peace. Of course, the criminals will do what criminals by definition do: ignore proscriptive laws, then the experiment will fail because it is irreconcilable with the terms and circumstances of reality.

Another nugget: The five-year period reports 374,300 rapes. In the vast majority of cases, the assailant did not use a firearm. One assumes that the assailant used some other weapon or simple physical size to overwhelm the victim.

Think of how easy it would be for a firearm-carrying woman to stop such a thug.

True. And while it's not possible to use that correlation to say *why* violent crimes are down, it is still possible to say with certainty that where there isn't even correlation (more guns-more crime) there absolutely IS NOT causation (more guns-more crime).

"Besides the drop in lead exposure more closely tracks the drop in violent crime (and has a physiological basis)."

That's an intriguing idea, actually.

"Also, the portion of the population which owns guns has actually declined. People who own guns are just buying more guns."

Declined from when? It's possible, I suppose, that at some point in the past a greater total proportion of citizens owned at least one firearm, but if it went down before it almost has to be going up now. Yes, of course, people who have guns are buying more guns, but there is too much data on people buying guns for the first time or women (who's partner may have guns) getting their own for the number to still be going down.

There's an old newspaper trick that they used on slow news weeks. They would simply print everything on the police blotter that would normally be ignored, and run a big black headline: CITY IN GRIP OF CRIME WAVE. Comparing the phony crime wave to the equally phony NATION IN GRIP OF GUN TERROR seems like more of the same, but the motives are different. While the "crime wave" was just a silly ploy to sell papers, the "gun terror" is part of a larger and more sinister scheme to deprive us of our rights.